Mosquito numbers are up, but still very low this season

Swarms of mosquitoes have seen their numbers spike recently with the wet weather, but it’s still not even close to the amount we see on a normal year.

City Entomologist, Jim Watts says while you may need your bug spray for the next week or so, we’ve only seen about 25% of the usual numbers for the summer pest.

Watts says when they take water samples after a long period of rain and they see early mosquito larvae, they begin their spraying programs:

“Usually we can get away with running one spraying program early, probably in May and they don’t really recover. We had a rain episode early, but it was quite dry earlier this year. We’ll take water samples after a long period of rain and if we find early mosquito larvae, we’ll begin our programs.”

It’s common for the amount of adult mosquitoes population to start tapering off rapidly by start of August.